Why am I an artist?

Nature, imagination, creativity, dialogue and activism

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• It's about the 'experience' of the struggle.

  • I want to have at the centre of my life, the joy and light of the struggle - and not the arrival, social media success, fame, wealth or material outcomes.

  • There is no failure, as long as I've stepped through the arcs of the creative experience (including the forgetting, the remembering), in constant battle with my resistances.

• Connecting to the mystery of the Universe​

  • The universe was created, it exists...yet even if we'll never know how or where our Universe comes from, by being an artist I can commune with the mystery. No other feeling of being alive compares.

• Lineage, Integration, Perception, Directionality and Optimism/Activism

  • Lineage: Drawing on our human heritage - all the wisdom of our ancestors, from the first impulses to ​draw on cave walls, to the pagan ceremonnies - we have a duty to honor and draw on what they represent in terms of the human journey and human truths.

  • Integration: Artists are unique in how they operate from 'syncretic' perspectives during the creative journey / experience - i.e. sensing of the "whole" (see Anton Ehrenzweig). We are therefore bring 'together' contrasting dimensions in the human experience such as in the polarities, ambiguities, contradictions that we come across in everyday life (e.g. free will vs. determinism; self vs. no-self; unity vs. diversity).

  • Perception: Through this integration of contrasts, artists touch on the next level of perception (e.g. playing with symbols, playing with our senses, provoking (e.g. how do technology and relegion relate to each other?) - what is the next hierarchical level of understanding that can hold such contrasts (nested hiearchies of systems).

  • Directionality: As we travel to such next levels, we develop a sense of directionality for the human condition. But directionality is about the dynamic of human creativity, rather than the arrival at a destination (salvation, elightenment etc.) 

  • Optimism and Activism: As an artist therefore, I hold a continual sense of optimism of what can happen. Even in the darkest moments - destruction and death are all part of the renewal process. And it becomes therefore my calling to be an activist in some form or other, to know why I am here.

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Arts and aesthetics key ideas from the authors who have most influenced me:

• Art should not be isolated and just associated to locations such as galleries and museums (ref. John Dewey)

• Art should be defined by the experience and the conversation (interally as inquiry and externally as collective discourse) that can be evoked. Conversation and narrative are fundamental elements of our collective sense-making (ref. David Whyte - the conversational nature of reality)  

• Art can point the way to next evolutionary steps (ref. Leonard Shlain - "Art and Physics").

• Our creative, artistic and aesthetic senses are crucial balances to our rational and logical capacities. Art and aesthetics are about a sense of the "whole" that is beyond language, and the porosity of the ego identity - that can be seen as our 'syncretic' thinking skills and capacities for feeling (ref Anton Ehrenzweig - "The Hidden Order of Art"; and Leonard Shlain - "Leonardo's Brain").

• Creativity is about "receiving" from a realm  larger than the self. Genius is not about simple location in the individual, but a connection to an outer source or guiding spirit (as per the original meaning of the word - from the Latin verb gignere meaning ‘to give birth or bring forth’). As referred to by many creatives from Julia Cameron, to David Lynch, to Elisabeth Gilbert (TED Talk here) 

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